Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
Nothing shows how outdated our concepts of "left" and "right" are more than the confusing politics behind NATO's war in Yugoslavia.
Apr 20, 1999 | For those of us who grew up during the Vietnam war and its ideological aftermath, the idea that what's happening over Kosovo is a "progressives' war" sounds like an Orwellian oxymoron. Opponents of NATO's action in Yugoslavia point out the obvious irony of former anti-war activists Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder joining forces to drop bombs on a backward country in the name of peace and humanitarianism.
Yet that phrase -- "progressives' war" -- is precisely the one lately used by Tony Blair to describe NATO operations against the Milosevic regime. As the most outspoken leader of the center-left coalition that now runs the most powerful nations in the Western alliance, the British prime minister clearly intends to send the message that military force can indeed serve humane purposes. At the same time, Blair is explicitly challenging the long-standing anti-war assumptions of the modern left.
Opposition to war as well as outright pacifism have been powerful themes among left-wing movements for more than a century. Although leftist ideology deemed revolutionary violence to be honorable, organized violence by the capitalist state was assumed to conceal darker motives like imperialism, profiteering and genocide. Armies conscripted from the ranks of the working class were viewed as tools of these hidden schemes, dispatched abroad to kill and die in causes that served the interests of the ruling class. The great American socialist Eugene Debs, to cite one example, went to prison because he openly agitated against the World War I draft.
A similar impulse propelled Norman Thomas, who during the 1930s headed the remnant of the party once led by Debs, into a strange coalition known as the America First movement organized mainly by right-wingers opposed to U.S. involvement in World War II. Besides Thomas, who later changed his mind, many leftists in that era insisted that there was no principled choice between the totalitarian Axis and the capitalist-imperialist Allies, right up until 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland.
Echoes of the old America First rallies can be heard today in the motley domestic movement against NATO, which draws together the likes of Patrick Buchanan and Noam Chomsky. From the right, Buchanan is, in fact, the proper heir of the fascist sympathizers whose isolationism defined itself as America First, a term he proudly uses in his current presidential campaign.
From the left, Chomsky, of course, represents a different ideological perspective, developed during the Cold War when the horrific conflict in Vietnam and other Third World countries depleted the legitimacy of the struggle against communism. Under the strain of those bloodbaths, the Western alliance cracked but never quite split apart. And the young activists who took to the streets here and in Europe during that era learned to be deeply suspicious of military force as an instrument of foreign policy.
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